Dahr Jamail Returns to Iraq to Find Rampant Torture and a Failed State Living in “Utter Devastation” + Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers

www.democracynow.org/ – Investigative journalist Dahr Jamail reported for Democracy Now! throughout the early stages of the U.S. invasion of Iraq 10 years ago. Now with Al Jazeera, Jamail has just returned from Iraq once again, finding what he calls a “failed state” living in “utter devastation.” In part one of our interview, Jamail discusses the harrowing security situation for Iraqis living in fear of bombings, executions, and kidnappings, the widespread torture in Iraq’s prisons, and the breakdown of security in what he calls a “a lawless state.”

Jamail is the author of “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq” and “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers

www.democracynow.org – In part two of our interview, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: “They’re are extremely hard to bear witness to, but it’s something that we all need to pay attention to … What this has generated is from 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were dropped on at the end of World War II.” Jamail has also reported on the refugee crisis of more than one million displaced Iraqis still inside the country, who are struggling to survive without government aid, a majority of them living in Baghdad.

When the brutal fight was going on by Fallujah, I followed on my computer the posts of Mr. Jamail. The gruesome pictures of families murdered in their homes by our soldiers. Little children, old people.
When the video clip came out from wiki leaks about the helicopter shooting down the people in the street, incl a reporter for I believe Reuter, it was not knew to me. I already had seen it.
I think it were soldiers who proudly themselves put it on there.
Like they had other video clips when they were having fun playing football with some Iraqi boys. But other disturbing ones as well.
It will be decades before the country will recover of this senseless inhumane invasion all on a pack of lies.
The people in charge are to blame, the things they tell the young inexperienced soldiers, to treat these like they are nothing.
The same thing happened in Vietnam.
More has to come out in the open how our soldiers are hurt by these actions. May be than people will finally wake up and say I will not be a part of these type of wars.

Maria, these are indeed the gravest crimes against humanity conceivable. Obama struts and preens in front of the corporate camera army in Israel and Jordan, with his scripted oratory to massage the “zionist” imposture with his imperialist puppet gestures.

They lament and decry the Nazi holocaust, but what happened in Vietnam was arguably even worse and as for Iraq ~ what words can describe the depravity of these monstrous predations?

The Security Council is a kindergarten for delinquency and the ICC is nothing but a commedia dell’arte of wigged fools. Thinking people are paralysed by the sheer scale of the atrocities perpetrated in their name and in our time. Our children will be ashamed of our feeble efforts.

We need to transform armies into rescue squads, refugee brigades, ecological battalions and environmental platoons, to launch a global programme of restoration and bioremediation, address the big issues like water and vegetation and ocean pollution. These despicable political goons should just get real or get lost.

There was a program two evenings ago on Dutch TV, about the torture in Iraq and colonel Steel being there. People screaming in agony.
Is that what our country stands for, that’s this is okay.
My heart goes out to the Iraqi people.
This whole lie of the Bush invasion, compleetly destroying this country and it’s people.

One of my closest friends is an Iraqi I knew from the Gypsy markets in N Spain. We used to discuss everything at great length. He told me a long time ago the US was planning to attack Iran after Iraq. He grew up as a staunch communist and was there during the Iran-Iraq war but emigrated to Canada, then Spain He became a devout Shiite Moslem, married in Spain and had a family.

He went back a few years ago after the invasion, to visit his mother and family when his father died. .A colleague, a fellow Iraqi traveled with him. This man was so devastated, traumatized and heart-broken by the experience, it was more than he could take and it actually killed him.

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